Courtney Love: 4 Reasons Why She's a Great Advocate for Recovery
Elle Magazine called her “the world’s most controversial blonde.” The Wire described her as having "an all-purpose destructiveness." Her half-sister called her “the human Enron.” She is the epitome of the hot mess. She is no role model.
But then, she never pretended to be.
Instead, she became the icon of the celebrity addict. An outsized character whose mixture of public struggles with substance abuse and diminished sense of self-preservation made her an enduring punchline for more than 25 years. Her drug-addled public appearances became the stuff of YouTube and urban legend. But what we were looking at was a tragedy and not a joke. It was a person in the throes of a life-threatening disease, a disease borne of addiction, trauma, and mental illness.
She also stands as a strong argument for the concept of recovery as a spectrum. As Joe Schrank of The Fix describes it, recovery is not a light switch decision: “It’s a batting average and no one bats 1000.” As someone who has battled addictions with heroin, cocaine, and benzos, she’ll be the first to admit she suffered her share of strike outs.
So why is Courtney Love make a great advocate for recovery?
Because she owns her addictions and her past: Love could be a graduate of the When You Tell Your Secrets, They Lose Their Power Over You school. She even talked openly about her suicide attempt. Nothing was off-limits. While culture responded to her by shaming her as a skank and a crackhead, she refused to give in to it. (What’s been said in the media often pales against what’s she says about herself.) In fact, she let us watch while she struggled. Even now, the drug issue seems to come up in every interview. She can’t avoid it, nor does she try.
Because drugs were her destiny: Love claims her mother gave her Riatlin and Valium when she was eight years old. Love would start smoking cigarettes at 11, tried heroin at 16 and marijuana somewhere before. Love’s addictions have deep roots. To her credit, Love has never been arrogant about her addiction. She doesn’t blame others. For an addict, arrogance can be deadly. It leads to lies, denial, defensiveness, and self-destruction. It seems Love has always been well acquainted with her fallibilities (which may explain why she was such an early adapter with drugs). She admits to battling depression most of her adult life. In recovery, an addict has to look in the mirror and they need help. Love knows she’s an addict. When an addict can admit this, there is always hope.
Because she took on another discipline to help her cope with sobriety: In her case it was Nichiren Buddhism. She has a daily chanting practice. She says it’s the chanting and meditation that turned her life around. Love, who’s practiced Buddhism since 1990 (clearly, she’d some chanting lapses over the years), says that on the days she doesn’t chant, bad things happen. Studies show that recovery can be much more successful with some kind of spiritual practice.
She’s committed to rehab: This may sound ironic, but it’s not. Not that this was always the case – Love has been through rehab on numerous occasions, including a six-month court ordered lockdown. (You could say that she’s proven her commitment because she’s been through it so many times.) She claims she has remained sober since 2007. This was confirmed in 2011.
And, still, through it all she worked in television and movies, was nominated for four Grammys and a Golden Globe, became a platinum-selling recording artist, and is practically a self-contained media cottage industry. All the while she also battled depression, endured the suicide of her husband, lost custody of her daughter twice, and relapsed multiple times. It would be an awful lot for anyone to handle. A person with less courage and a less enduring flame of hope would’ve never survived.
Clearly, it was something her husband didn’t have: Praise to Courtney Love.
